Creation and implementation of a disaster recovery plan is essential to enable recovery from a disaster. Disasters can include natural disasters, such as floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes, and man-made disasters including malicious activity and human error. Disasters such as these beget unavailability of hardware and software systems relied on by various entities. For example, if a data center employed by a business is rendered unavailable by a disaster, data will be unable to be read or written, and data may be lost.
Implementing data replication and failover as part of a disaster recovery plan for the application can provide a type of insurance against disasters or regional outages. Data replication is a process by which application data from a primary site is replicated or mirrored to a secondary site. If the primary site fails due to a disaster, an application is transitioned to the secondary site in a process called failover.